Chapter 11 Susanna Rowson and the transatlantic captivity narrative
Lise Sorensen
“The American equivalent of the Grub Street criminal biography,” Roy Harvey Pearce wrote about the Indian captivity narrative
in his 1947 essay, paving the way for the critical assumption that the genre
had little to recommend it but its relative influence on later male writers.
1 Today’s seminal scholarship in the field views “the significances of the captivity narrative,” to evoke Pearce’s essay title,
as nothing but incidental. Placing Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative center stage in transatlantic literary history as
the prototype of the Richardsonian novel, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse suggest that “one has to go to America…to
understand where English novels come from.”
2 Armstrong and Tennenhouse thus call for a paradigm shift in English and American literature, arguing that “most scholars
and critics still assume that American literature originated in England. By the time they enter our classrooms, students already
know how to read
Pamela and
Clarissa, much as we ourselves did, as the prototype both for English domestic fiction and for the American novel, from Rowson and
Cooper to Hawthorne and James.”
3 This chapter enters into the critical debate on the captivity narrative by focusing on the English-born Susanna Rowson, whose
transatlantic life and literary career have been obscured in both national canons: on the American side of the Atlantic “she
stands as an early canonical figure, while on the [British] she languishes in obscurity.”
4 Rowson’s
Slaves in Algiers (1794) and
Reuben and Rachel (1798)
5 – the former a play modeled on the Barbary captivity narrative, the latter a novel structured around the Indian captivity
narrative
6 and its Richardsonian version – are hybrid texts which allow us to reconsider some of the generic and disciplinary assumptions
which underlie traditional programs in English and American literature.
Once regarded as a unique American genre, often called upon to support the logic of American exceptionalism, the captivity
narrative is now increasingly being recognized by historians and literary critics as a transatlantic phenomenon. In
Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850,
historian Linda Colley highlights the need for a comparative transatlantic approach to the study of the Indian captivity narrative,
situating the genre
within the context of the seventeenth-century Barbary captivity narrative:
The 400,000 or so men and women from Scotland, Ireland, Wales and above all England who crossed the Atlantic in the course
of the seventeenth century, almost certainly took with them – along with so much else – a knowledge of the kinds of stories
related by and about those of their countrymen who were captured by the powers of Barbary and Islam. These stories of capture
by the forces of the Crescent were then adapted to a new American environment and to very different dangers.
7
If Colley recontextualizes the Indian captivity narrative within the seventeenth-century English Barbary narrative, Paul Baepler
brings the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American Barbary captivity narratives
to the forefront of captivity studies with his anthology
White Slaves, African Masters. Directing our attention to this understudied body of captivity narratives, Baepler argues that the American Barbary narrative,
the Indian captivity narrative, and the slave narrative are generically interconnected and ought to be discussed in a shared
discursive realm.
8 Gordon M. Sayre likewise advocates a shared interpretive approach, suggesting that future scholarship should concentrate
on the notion of the renegade and carry out “a transnation
al, comparative analysis of the differences between captors and captives.”
9 Joe Snader, on the other hand, seeks to inscribe the significance of the British captivity narratives in literary history.
10 Responding to Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark, who define the genre as “‘one of America’s oldest literary genres and
its most unique,’” Snader “want[s] to assert the temporal and indeed the logical priority of the British tradition over the
American in order to examine how the former influenced the latter as well as the points of divergence between them.”
11 While Snader retreats from this somewhat hierarchical model of “influence” by seeing the captivity genre not “as a genre
that belongs to any particular nation of origin,”
12 his approach invites a few words on the methodological concerns of this chapter. I am mostly concerned with examining dialogic
textual relationships as opposed to proving the assumed influence of one national literature on another, the method characteristic
of the traditional discipline of comparative literature. As Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor note, the problem here is that
the “‘influence’ story assumes hierarchical forms of connection that answer to a politically- and culturally-inflected historicism,
in which a dominant (prior) position exerts power and imposes uniformity on a subdued other.”
13 Manning and Taylor
suggest that “Hans Jauss’s perception that literary history needs to be understood in terms of ‘dialogue as well as process’
would seem to lend itself well to transatlantic literary studies.”
14 We may also fruitfully read captivity literature within Mary Louise Pratt’s “‘contact’ perspective,” a term developed to
account for imperial travel writings, which “emphasizes how subjects get constituted in and by their relations to each other.
It treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and ‘travelees,’ not in terms of separateness, but in
terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, and often within radically asymmetrical relations
of power.”
15 Aligning itself with criticism which departs from isolationist national and generic paradigms, this chapter views the captivity
narrative as a hybrid genre emerging from encounters in the “contact zones”
16 of the Atlantic world.
In her study of the continuities between the captivity narrative and sentimental literature, Michelle Burnham suggests that
we couple Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia with Pratt’s notion of the contact zone to understand the plasticity of
the captivity genre:
The heteroglossia that, for Bakhtin, characterizes novelistic discourse is not only an internal characteristic of the genre
but an external condition for its production: novels
appear out of the exchanges that traverse those zones of contact where cultures and nations chaotically cross. Colonial American
captivity narratives
document the radical cultural contact that takes place on such a border, and their further passage across the border of the
Atlantic puts the narratives themselves into dialogic contact with other texts. This ceaseless mobility suggests that novelistic
discourse emerges not in fixed locations or static moments but within a constant movement
across borders.
17
Rowson’s
Slaves in Algiers and
Reuben and Rachel, I suggest, precisely exemplify such a dialogic transatlantic account of novelistic discourse. These texts have been rendered
invisible in most studies of the captivity genre. Pearce observes that “As a popular genre, or genres, it comes to have a
kind of incidental literary value, enters literary history proper in
Edgar Huntly, and functions as a popular vehicle for various historically and culturally individuated purposes.”
18 Considered in this context,
Reuben and Rachel, which appeared the year before Charles Brockden Brown’s
Edgar Huntly, offers another trajectory of literary history, one compellingly explored by Christopher Castiglia, who argues that women
writers before Brown adapted the captivity narrative in their captivity romance
s, and thus contributed to mythologies of the American wilderness. “Pearce denies women their place in the founding of literary
history ‘proper,’” Castiglia writes. “This assumption is repeated in the most extensive study of the
captivity
tradition in American literature, Richard Slotkin’s
Regeneration through Violence. Slotkin accords only one page to Lydia Maria Child’s
Hobomok and four to Catharine Sedgwick’s
Hope Leslie. In comparison, Slotkin accords Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales over one hundred pages of text.”
19 As a self-conscious rewriting of mythical history from women’s point of view,
Reuben and Rachel is particularly relevant to discussions of gender
and foundational texts.
Slaves in Algiers and
Reuben and Rachel appeared at a time when the newly independent US had to prove itself as a mercantile power in the Atlantic world. In Mediterranean
waters, however, American ships, no longer under the protection of the British navy, were at the mercy of Barbary pirates.
“After independence, instead of becoming an equal partner in the Atlantic world,” historian Frank Lambert writes, “the United
States was again a dependent – subjugated by British trade restrictions and defenceless against the Barbary pirates.”
20 “The enslavement of white Americans off the north coast of Africa thus constituted the nation’s first international crisis
in the fullest sense of the term: not only were Americans in trouble abroad, but the United States government was losing face
at home.”
21 As an increasing number of US sailors were held captive in the North African slave states, the Barbary captivity narrative
grew in popularity alongside a resurgent interest in the Indian captivity narrative, which was reinterpreted as a revolution
ary text.
22 Greg Sieminski explains this postwar interest in captivity narratives “as America’s attempt to reassure itself about its
independence; in the face of its impotence before Barbary pirates, the young nation needed to believe it would eventually
assert its sovereignty.”
23 In her reading of
Slaves in Algiers, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon suggests that this distinctly global context within which American national identity develops is
often dismissed in discussions of early American literature:
Literary criticism has tended to locate the origins of American literature in an Emersonian severing of ties with Europe and
the cultivation of indigenous production within an enclosed American field, yet Rowson’s play reveals an early national culture
operating within a set of global relations and indicates the way in which the “national” imaginary depends upon peoples beyond
the enclosure it seeks to make immanent.
24
With reference to Rowson’s play and the Barbary hostage crisis, Dillon then makes two related arguments: “first, that race
emerges as an aspect of gender construction within republican and nationalist politics in the early US and, second, that the
creation of new forms of nationalized
(and racialized) identity occurs in a global-transatlantic context rather than a solely nation
al one.”
25 Drawing on Dillon’s analysis, I suggest that
Slaves in Algiers and
Reuben and Rachel assert American
ness as a quintessentially transatlantic identity in which Britishness guarantees whiteness. Adapting the captivity
narrative, Rowson constructs this superior Anglo-American character in opposition to racialized captors and their cultures.
Taking forms from Shakespearean comedy and Cervantesesque captivity narratives,
26 Slaves in Algiers is a play defined by generic hybridity. In Algiers, American and European captives manage to revolt and free themselves whilst
converting their Muslim captors to republican ideals of freedom. There is transculturation of the captor, but Anglo-American
captives’ sense of their identity remains unchallenged. With an eye to America’s transition from colony to independent nation,
Rowson reunites the captive members of the Constant family: a British officer, his American-born wife, Rebecca, and their
two children, Olivia and Augustus, who were born in England and America respectively. If Rowson wants us to ponder “what’s
in a name,” the Constants are prototypes of white Anglo-Americans, steadfast in their attachment to the cause of freedom,
as are all Rowson’s Britons and Americans. In a play staged in the wake of the Revolutionary War, against the backdrop of
the Barbary hostage crisis and of domestic slavery
, the notion of freedom is evoked in a multilayered interpretive framework. Rowson uses this suggestive context to advocate
American women’s political liberation, asserting in her prologue that “The reigning
virtues she has dar’d to scan, / And tho’ a woman, plead the Rights of Man.”
27 She seems to be suggesting that women are held captive in America, where they lack constitutional rights. “The author’s interest
in slavery is largely in its use as a metaphor,” Dorothy Weil notes. “There is little of the realistic in Mrs. Rowson’s depiction
of captivity, and little genuine understanding of the actual victims of oppression.”
28 For Rowson, the freedom of the daughters of the new Republic is bound up with their British parentage, not achieved in spite
of it. Dillon describes
Slaves in Algiers as an “anti-
Charlotte Temple”
29 insofar as Olivia Constant’s British and American genealogy makes her the ideal daughter of Columbia:
Rowson thus offers a version of American political identity for women that does not involve breaking bonds with British parental
authority and that enables a republican daughter to be both virtuous and American. Rather than seeing American freedom, less
than two decades after the end of the Revolutionary War, as the product of a war with Britain, Rowson describes it as the
product of a union with Britain.
30
This successful linkage of American and British identity is enabled by Rowson’s adaptation of the Barbary captivity narrative.
Merging American and British virtues in the face of barbarous captors, Rowson argues for “unity and mutual forgiveness in
the name of an Anglo-American commercial imperium. As a result, not only are Federalist and Democrat indistinct entities within
the drama, but so are English and American.”
31 English and American entities are rendered indistinct by being contrasted with the more pronounced difference of the slave
master. Baepler explains the relationship between captive and captor in Barbary captivity narratives thus:
The unbalanced relationship between captive and master plays a key role in establishing a defining boundary between the captive’s
own identity and that of her African captor. From the moment of first contact, the writer can clearly establish a moral and
cultural difference based on the “unmoral,” “unlawful,” “inhuman” act of abduction itself, which begins to define a widening
gulf between the civilized and the barbaric. The aggrieved captive can then easily insist upon other differences between herself
and her new masters, differences that are usually framed in terms of something lacking and something a civilized country could
eventually supply: rationality, progress, history, self-control, etc.
32
Lacking everything that the Constant family members can supply, Ben Hassan, a Shylockean character who “put on the turban”
(p. 24) in Algiers for commercial gain, represents the uncivilized captor against whom the true Anglo-American could define
herself. The antithesis of Rebecca Constant, whom he holds captive in spite of having received her ransom money, Ben Hassan,
the renegado, is inconstant and cunningly appropriates religious and national discourses to suit his base needs. Wanting to
marry Rebecca, though already married, Ben Hassan stretches her use of the word liberty: “Ish, but our law gives us great
many vives. – our law gives liberty in love; you are an American and you must love liberty” (p. 21). Liberty, Rowson shows,
loses its true American (and English) meaning when reinterpreted by figures who cannot claim an Anglo-American legacy. As
Rebecca puts it, “Hold, Hassan; prostitute not the sacred word by applying it to licentiousness; the sons and daughters of
liberty, take justice, truth, and mercy, for their leaders, when they list under her glorious banners” (p. 21). Dillon notes
that “Rowson’s staging of the virtuous (female) American’s defense against corrupt seduction contains a key term that is strikingly
different from the Americanized allegory of Clarissa Harlowe’s battle to maintain her virtue: in Rowson’s staging, Rebecca
is not defending herself against corruption by an Anglo-American rake but against a racialized, un-American miscreant.”
33Rowson thus places racial identity center stage in a play that explores the virtues of freedom: here one’s capacity to embody
freedom, as the Constants do, depends on one’s racial genealogy. Henry, another American captive betrothed to Olivia Constant,
pronounces his captors the real slaves for lacking the proper national, racial characteristics: “call us not slaves; – you
are a slave indeed, to rude ungoverned passion; to pride, to avarice and lawless love” (p. 64). While the play condemns slavery, it toys with the idea that slavery may be justified in the case of racial rogues like the Jew, Ben Hassan: “Ben Hassan,
your avarice, treachery and cruelty should be severely punished,” Frederic, a Christian slave, tells him in the last scene,
“for, if any one deserves slavery, it is he who could raise his own fortune on the miseries of others” (p. 73). To speak the
word slavery “dyes the cheek with crimson” (p. 73), in Rebecca’s words, but the cheek apparently blushes most on behalf of
white slaves.
In the international context of slave-holding Algiers, Rowson churns up questions of racial and national identity in her exploration
of women’s personal, national, and political freedom. If the play flirts with notions of performative selfhood by adopting
the Shakespearean motif of mistaken identities through various scenes of cross-dressing, it ultimately rejects such notions
by insisting on the primacy of birthplace. Fetnah, a virtuous Moorish woman who has been sold into the Dey’s harem by her
father, Ben Hassan, explains to a servant that she is mistaken about her true national identity: “You are mistaken. – I was
not born in Algiers, I drew my first breath in England” (p. 16). Schooled in “the love of liberty” (p. 16) by Rebecca, Fetnah’s
susceptibility to American ideals is bound up with her natal society: Rebecca’s “precepts are engraven on [her] heart, [she
feels] that [she] was born free” (p. 17). However, when Fetnah is invited to accompany the freed captives to America at the
end of the play, she declines in order to remain in Algiers and look after her father. Her racially mixed genealogy therefore
does not pose a threat to the gene pool of the new Republic and to filial duty, the notion that haunts
Charlotte Temple. “Daughters, [Fetnah] promised, would continue to defer to fathers,” as Rust puts it, “just as Muslims would forever defer
to the Constants and Frederics of the Northern Hemisphere.”
34 The play presents freedom as a particular American and British birthright which is to be upheld by the Constants: “must a
boy born in Columbia, claiming liberty as his birth-right,” Rebecca soliloquizes, “pass all his days in slavery. – How often
have I gazed upon his face, and fancied I could trace
his father’s features; how often have I listen’d to his voice, and thought his father’s spirit spoke within him?” (p. 18).
Since the father of Rebecca’s son is British, Rowson’s play gives credence
to a British-American genealogy characterized by an inherent notion of freedom. Birthplace and parentage also secure whiteness
as a stable identity in contrast to characters with ethnically mixed backgrounds.
Like other Barbary captivity narratives
,
Slaves in Algiers capitalized on the increasing interest in the continent of Africa, which many westerners viewed as a
tabula rasa to be inscribed by imperial discourse. “As a result of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution
,” Baepler notes, “a growing curiosity arose about the African interior, a space filled by confused fiction on most maps.”
35 Barbary captivity narratives helped fill out such maps imaginatively, and thus the narrator’s genuineness often became an
issue for readers.
The Narrative of Robert Adams (1816) is a telling case. “Adams’s narrative, the only Barbary captivity narrative by an African-American, resembles a U.S.
slave narrative in that the account was generated by a white amanuensis who, along with several dozen inquisitors, grilled
the former captive with questions and later cobbled together a third-person narrative.”
36 Upon first encountering Adams, the British vice-consul at Mogadore, who inquires into the veracity of his account, is bewildered
that he cannot establish any stable parameters within which to read Adams’s racial identity: “The appearance, features and
dress of this man upon his arrival at Mogadore, so perfectly resembled those of an Arab, or rather of a Shilluh, his head
being shaved, and his beard scanty and black, that I had difficulty at first in believing him to be a Christian. When I spoke
to him in English, he answered me in a mixture of Arabic and broken English, and sometimes in Arabic only.”
37 The vice-consul then approaches Adams with the notion of using mapping as a scientific tool to determine his journey and
identity: “I made a chart,” the vice-consul writes, “on which I trace
d his course.”
38 Having drawn a geographical map of Adams’s journey, the vice-consul begins to trace his racial and national genealogy: “He
told me that he was born up the river of New York, where his father lived when he quitted America; and I learnt, either from
himself or from some other of the Charles’s crew, that his mother was a Mulatto, which circumstance his features and complexion
seemed to confirm.”
39 Having succeeded in mapping out Adams’s nationality and race, the vice-consul can make sense of his narrative and vouch for
its veracity. Reading the literature of captivity through imperial eyes, to evoke Pratt’s title phrase, is always also a way
of reading race.
Captivity narratives draw geographical and racial boundaries, which are constantly negotiated in the contact zone, in their
attempts to understand locations and individuals. In
A Journal, of the Captivity and Sufferings of John Foss (1798), the American captive seeks, like the vice-consul above,
to account for the inhabitants of Algiers in schematic terms characteristic of Enlightenment thought on cultural development.
“The Cologlies, Moors and Arabs, are the most numerous in Algiers,” Foss writes. “They compose the great body of the inhabitants;
but it may be supposed, that amidst such a variety of different race
s, immense numbers cannot be said to belong to any particular tribe or nation whatever.”
40 Failing to account for the national affiliation of the inhabitants, Foss then makes comparisons that would be familiar to
readers of Indian captivity narratives
: “The Moors, or Morescoes, are generally a tall thin, spare set of people, not much inclining to fat, and of a very dark
complexion, much like the Indians of North America.”
41 Jonathan Cowdery, a US surgeon held captive in Tripoli, makes a similar comparison, in his
American Captives in Tripoli (1806), to explain the local marriage customs: “Marriages are proclaimed in Tripolo [
sic], by one or two old women, who run through the streets, making a most hideous yelling, and frequently clapping their hands
to their mouths, similar to the American Indians in their
pow wows.”
42 The Indian captivity narrative forms an interpretive framework for readers of the Barbary captivity narrative, indicating
the wider transatlantic context in which these overlapping genres must be seen. Such comparisons also place North American
Indians in the category of Moorish “barbarians,” underscoring their joint position at the periphery of the “civilized” parts
of the Atlantic world. Appropriating North Africa as the scene on which America’s racial theatre is performed, Rowson participates
in such geographical and racial mappings, allowing her to imaginatively locate racial others outside the borders of America
and Great Britain.
43Rowson continues to explore national identity and genealogy within the complex matrix of race, gender
, and captivity in her two-volume novel
Reuben and Rachel. Turning history into
her story in her retelling of America’s transatlantic past, she spans over ten generations of women, starting with Christopher
Columbus’s son’s marriage to a Peruvian princess, going through the British succession crisis, and back across the ocean to
colonial New England, where the twins Reuben and Rachel finally settle as prototypes for a new generation of Anglo-Americans.
The question Rowson asked in
Slaves in Algiers – “what’s in a name?” – is also relevant to
Reuben and Rachel. The foremost protagonist of Volume
I, daughter of an English Protestant and heiress to Columbus and an Indian princess, is called Columbia and represents a founding
mother of the modern Atlantic world: “let the new world be called
Columbia,” Rowson’s Columbus writes to Queen Isabelle of Spain. “It will unite the name of Beatina with Columbus, perpetuating her
loved name with mine.”
44 The gesture of naming,
according to Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, is central to texts such as
Reuben and Rachel, which inquire into “a novel late eighteenth-century construction – the American subject”:
45
For Euro-Americans, the
name has been the game, as much as, or more than, the seizure of land or the exercise of military power…In creating a national
identity, British and other European settlers and their descendants had not only to seize America’s land, they had to legitimate
that seizure by seizing the name American as well. Put another way, they had to imagine themselves Americans and, in the imagining,
constitute a radical new imperial category – white Americans.
46
Smith-Rosenberg locates Rowlandson’s captivity narrative as a key text in this process: “Writing to praise God’s goodness
and mercy, Rowlandson composed a bitter, violent text that reaffirmed white Puritans as God’s chosen people, expelled American
Indians from the human race and confirmed America as the Puritans’ promised land.”
47 Suggesting that
Reuben and Rachel inverts this scenario, whilst it “maintains Rowlandson’s politicization of the female subject,” Smith-Rosenberg argues that
Volume
I “undoes Rowlandson’s racism.”
48 Volume
II “in its turn invert[s] Rowson’s inversion of Rowlandson,”
49 and Smith-Rosenberg concludes that the novel ends in ideological inconsistencies. Adding to Smith-Rosenberg’s reading of
these textual continuities, I suggest that Rowson adopts Rowlandson’s organizing principle of the “remove” as a vehicle for
critiquing women’s place in history and in the nation.
In
The Soveraignty and Goodness of God (1682), Rowlandson divided her narrative into numerated “removes,” which she used as a spatial, social, and temporal structuring
device to make sense of her captivity experience: “that I may better declare what happened to me during that grievous Captivity,
I shall particularly speak of the severall Removes we had up and down the Wilderness.”
50 Rowlandson’s removes are bound up with the notion of the frontier, the boundary between white (agri)culture and Indian wilderness,
a boundary drawn onto the landscape in the shape of an “English Path”: “As we went along, I saw a place where English Cattle
had been: that was comfort to me, such as it was: quickly after that we came to an English Path, which so took with me, that
I thought I could have freely lyen down and dyed. That day, a little after noon, we came to Squaukheag, where the Indians
quickly spread themselves over the deserted English Fields.”
51 The preface to John Marrant’s 1785 captivity narrative describes this boundary as a literal and figurative fence crossed
by the captive: “He crosses the fence, which marked the boundary between the wilderness and the cultivated country.”
52 The captivity experience can thus be conceived of as a kind of
culture-crossing that challenges established notions of identity. As Castiglia argues, “the captivity narratives persistently
explore generic and cultural changes, divisions, and differences occasioned by the captive’s cultural crossings.”
53 Rowlandson’s removes, then, suggest the mapping of physical boundaries onto the land as well as the individual’s mental mapping
of boundaries, boundaries which become remapped during captivity. Colley writes:
Looking hard at captivity experiences…provides a way of exploring frontiers in the minds of individuals…Captivity narratives…offer
access to people suddenly reduced to a state of liminality, taken away from their normal position in life, stripped of customary
marks of status and identity, and
removed in many cases from the reinforcement of their own kind. So positioned, men and women could be led to re-examine issues of
nation
al, religious and racial belonging, who and what they were, and how far this mattered.
54
Reuben and Rachel employs the multilayered trope of the remove to stress women’s isolation from history
, education, and national politics. This sense of isolation is strongly suggested on the very first page of the novel where
we find Columbia and her mother in a “retired solitary situation” (p. 41), living in a decaying castle “situated on the borders
of Wales” (p. 41). Removed from the political power base of London, women are divorced from the scientific and historical
paradigms established by men. With Columbus, a figure of mixed attraction to Rowson,
Reuben and Rachel suggests that men have defined the epistemological parameters within which the Atlantic world is understood. Viewing the
Atlantic as a blank space waiting to be epistemologically inscribed, like Africa discussed above, Columbus writes to his wife:
“‘Columbus has an enterprising spirit that will carve out a fortune, even from a barren waste.’ For is not the ocean a barren
waste?” (p. 52). Highlighting the importance of female historical agents such as Queen Isabella of Spain, Lady Jane Grey,
and Elizabeth I, as well as centering plot development around generations of admirable fictional women, Rowson’s novel is
a counterdiscourse to a version of the past which has removed women from its narrative. Indeed,
Reuben and Rachel was written to encourage women to “the attentive perusal of history” (p. 38). Rowson’s exposure of the colonist origins of
America, moreover, counters an “effacement of history [that] is particularly problematic for First Nations people, as it renders
violent colonisation into originary myth.”
55
Drawing on the conventions of the Richardsonian novel, Rowson suggests that women are reduced to passive captives through
seduction as well
as by romance
leading to marriage: if seduction literally kills women, marriage strips women of rights, making them live a juridical and
social death. Sir James Howard, an advisor to Queen Mary, who seduces Columbia’s beloved attendant and leaves her to die in
childbirth, figures as the ultimate libertine. Bringing Columbia and her mother as prisoners to the court of Mary after they
have helped Lady Grey’s young heir to escape abroad to be raised in the Protestant faith, Howard tries to seduce Columbia
too. Like a true Richardsonian libertine, Howard “remove[s] them to a mansion of his own, not far from London” (p. 133) to
better seduce the daughter, “request[ing] them to be constantly ready for a removal” (p. 138).
56 Columbia and her mother later realize that “they were removed on the morning following the night” Queen Mary died (p. 142),
and that they have been held captive on false pretenses. Casting Howard’s attempted seductions as a series of removes merges
seduction and captivity
: indeed, all romantic attachments between men and women are articulated in terms of captivity. Rachel’s future husband, Auberry,
is described as “a most captivating man” (p. 272) to whom she in turn responds “with an ingenuous freedom that captivated
his heart” (p. 272). Once married, Rachel loses her freedom and is “removed to a lodging provided for by her husband” (p.
275) because she does not match his class status and must be kept a secret. While Auberry entertains his family
abroad, Rachel falls into obscurity and poverty. She ultimately crosses the Atlantic where she is reunited with her husband
and her brother, but remains just as legally and socially powerless. Social, legal, and political removes constitute women’s
lives on both sides of the Atlantic in
Reuben and Rachel: the eventual political remove from the British, Rowson suggests here as in
Slaves in Algiers, does not bring about women’s emancipation.
If Rowson’s adoption of Rowlandson’s trope suggests women’s overall cultural captivity, removes also offer the possibility
of escape. Rowson’s women thrive in the wilderness, whether that of the Old World or the New, obtaining here the opportunity
to realize their full potential. As Columbia’s mother puts it when they are planning to escape from Howard: “we must summon
all our fortitude to brave even hardship and danger without shrinking…we are particularly called upon at this time, to exert
the strength and faculties of both mind and body, with which nature has bountifully endowed us” (p. 143). Drawing on the captivity
narrative allows Rowson to imagine an alternative version of women’s history
, one that escapes domesticity and gender conventions. Jessy Oliver, Rachel’s bosom friend, who has been confined to a petty
domestic situation upon rejecting a suitor of her father’s choice, and who crosses the Atlantic with
Rachel and marries Reuben in the end, indicates such an escape: “I am weary of this dull sameness of scene, and you and I
will now set out together in search of adventures” (p. 348). “Using a captivity plot, Rowson both literalizes the restrictions
forced on white women by their roles in society and provides a narrative in which constriction is escaped,” Castiglia writes.
“Through their captivity, Columbia Arundel and Rachel Dudley are paradoxically offered escape from the narrative paths that
in other novels appeared inevitable.”
57 Rowson, then, structures her novel as a series of temporal, geographical, and generic removes through which another story
can emerge.
But as the story moves temporally closer to her historical and political present in Volume
II, Rowson omits the positive characterizations of Indian captivity and transculturation which dominated the plot in Volume
I. Noble savages become plain savages, and interracial marriage ceases to be presented as a means of reconciliation between
colonists and Indians. Reuben, whose transcultured grandfather became a chief during his Indian captivity, escapes because
he wants to remain English: “Reuben had seen too much of savage men and manners to have a wish to remain amongst them” (p.
306). Rejecting the hand of Eumea, the chief’s daughter who has assisted Reuben in his escape and who loves him passionately,
Reuben marries the English Jessy, whilst Eumea, now a servant, takes her own life. Upon her death, it turns out that Reuben’s
Irish servant adores Eumea. “Within the more conservative and restrictive context that Rowson has developed,” Joseph F. Bartolomeo
notes, “a ‘handmaid’ from a displaced race
can be paired only with a servant from a subjugated people.”
58 Wrapping up her transatlantic history of American interracial identity, Rowson sets the stage for
Slaves in Algiers where the genealogy of “true-born Americans,” in Reuben’s words (p. 368), is English and thus white. Reuben and Rachel and
their families represent a white, rising agricultural and mercantile class, whose destinies have been removed from those of
Indians. The American subject and name, to revisit Smith-Rosenberg’s analysis, has been whitewashed.
To conclude, Rowson’s naming of English-American subjects in an explicitly transatlantic dialogic context unsettles traditional
scholarship, which has been held captive by fixed categories of English and American literature, resulting in the removal
of
Slaves in Algiers and
Reuben and Rachel from their national canons. Given their generic and geographical crossings, these texts invite critical approaches which
stress the artificial divides created by such categories. The “traveling genre
”
59 of the captivity narrative, which Rowson adapts in its Cervantesesque, Rowlandsonian, and
Richardsonian manifestations, suggests that reductionist national labels are inadequate to account for a literature which
was constantly changing as it crossed the Atlantic time and again.
NOTES
1 Roy Harvey Pearce, “The Significances of the Captivity Narrative,” American Literature 19:1 (1947), 1–20 (7). Pearce argues that captivity narratives become increasingly sensational by 1750 and are therefore of limited academic
interest.
2 Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, “The American Origins of the English Novel,” American Literary History 4:3 (1992), 386–410 (388). See also
Armstrong and Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
3 Armstrong and Tennenhouse, “The American Origins of the English Novel,” p. 403.
4 Tilar J. Mazzeo, “The Impossibility of Being Anglo-American: The Rhetoric of Emigration and Transatlanticism in British Romantic Culture, 1791–1833,” European Romantic Review 16:1 (2005), 59–78 (62). Mazzeo explains Rowson’s inclusion in the American literary canon and her exclusion from the English literary canon
thus: “at a time when English attitudes toward national identity were becoming…more exclusive and more rigid, the transatlantic
and transnational Susanna Rowson simply had no place in the national literature being established – a national literature
that during the Romantic period increasingly defined itself in opposition to the United States.” See Mazzeo, “The Impossibility
of Being Anglo-American,” p. 62.
5 Reuben and Rachel first appeared in Boston in 1798, then in London in 1799 and Dublin in 1805. See
Joseph F. Bartolomeo, Introduction to Susanna Rowson, Reuben and Rachel; or, Tales of Old Times, ed. Bartolomeo (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2009), pp. 8–32 (p. 10).
6 Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola argues that traditional accounts of the Indian captivity narrative operate with too rigid
conceptions of fact and fiction in their definitions of the genre: “A traditional view of the Indian captivity narrative’s
development holds that there were three distinct phases: authentic religious accounts in the seventeenth century, propagandist
and stylistically embellished texts in the eighteenth century, and outright works of fiction in the late eighteenth and into
the nineteenth centuries. Yet although these divisions may indicate a trend, they do not adequately account for the presence
of both fact and fiction throughout the form’s history and they do not go back far enough to incorporate the sixteenth-century
accounts or forward enough to anticipate the twentieth-century ones. At each end of the definitional pole lie fact and fiction,
but it would seem more apt to designate the texts in between as ‘factive,’ meaning tending toward fact, and ‘fictive,’ meaning
tending toward fiction, and to recognize that both factive and fictive texts use appropriate narrative strategies.” See
Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola (ed.), Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives (New York: Penguin, 1998), p. xii. This chapter includes both “factive and fictive texts” in its use of the terms Indian captivity narrative and Barbary captivity
narrative, viewing them as generically fluid.
7 Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), p. 140.
8 Paul Baepler (ed.), White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
9 Gordon M. Sayre, “Renegades from Barbary: The Transnational Turn in Captivity Studies,” American Literary History 22:2 (2010), 347–59 (357).
10 Joe Snader, Caught between Worlds: British Captivity Narratives in Fact and Fiction (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2000).
13 Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor (eds.), Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 7.
15 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 8.
16 Pratt defines “contact zone” as “the space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically
separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical
inequality, and intractable conflict.”
Ibid., p. 8.
17 Michelle Burnham, Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682–1861 (Hanover, NH: University Presses of New England, 1997), pp. 56–57.
18 Pearce, “The Significances of the Captivity Narrative,” p. 1.
19 Christopher Castiglia, Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), n. 2, p. 195.
20 Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), p. 15.
21 Marion Rust, Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson’s Early American Women (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), p. 215.
22 Baepler (ed.),
White Slaves, African Masters, p. 24.
23 Greg Sieminski, “The Puritan Captivity Narrative and the Politics of the American Revolution,” American Quarterly 42:1 (1990), 35–56 (52).
24 Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “‘Slaves in Algiers’: Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage,” American Literary History 16:3 (2004), 407–36 (407).
26 Rowson cites
Don Quixote as a literary source in her preface to
Slaves in Algiers. See
Susanna Rowson, Slaves in Algiers or, A Struggle for Freedom, ed. Jennifer Margulis and Karen M. Poremski (Acton, MA: Copley, 2000), p. 6.
27 Rowson,
Slaves in Algiers, p. 9. Subsequent page references to this work are given in parentheses in the text.
28 Dorothy Weil, In Defense of Women: Susanna Rowson (1762–1824), (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), p. 94.
29 Dillon, “‘Slaves in Algiers’: Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage,” p. 409.
31 Rust,
Prodigal Daughters, p. 218.
32 Baepler (ed.),
White Slaves, African Masters, p. 33.
33 Dillon, “‘Slaves in Algiers’: Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage,” p. 415.
34 Rust,
Prodigal Daughters, p. 231.
35 Baepler (ed.),
White Slaves, African Masters, p. 34.
37 Robert Adams,
The Narrative of Robert Adams, A Sailor, who was wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa, in the Year 1810, was detained three
years in slavery by the Arabs of the Great Desert, and resided several months in the city of Tombuctoo, in
White Slaves, African Masters, ed. Baepler, p. 211.
40 John D. Foss,
A Journal, of the Captivity and Sufferings of John Foss; several years a prisoner in Algiers: Together with some account of
the treatment of Christian Slaves when sick: – and observations on the manners and customs of the Algerines, in
White Slaves, African Masters, ed. Baepler, p. 92.
42 Jonathan Cowdery,
American Captives in Tripoli; or, Dr. Cowdery’s Journal in Miniature. Kept during his late captivity in Tripoli, in
White Slaves, African Masters, ed. Baepler, p. 184.
43 Dillon, “‘Slaves in Algiers’: Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage,” pp. 423–24.
44 Rowson,
Reuben and Rachel, p. 59. Subsequent references to this work are cited in parentheses in the text.
45 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Subject Female: Authorizing American Identity,” American Literary History 5:3 (1993), 481 –511 (481).
46 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Captured Subjects / Savage Others: Violently Engendering the New American,” Gender and History 5:2 (1993), 177–95 (177).
50 Mary Rowlandson, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed, in Held Captive by Indians: Selected Narratives 1642–1836, ed. Richard VanDerBeets (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), p. 45.
52 John Marrant,
A Narrative of the Lord’s wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, in
Held Captive by Indians, ed. VanDerBeets, p. 179.
53 Castiglia,
Bound and Determined, p. 4.
54 Linda Colley, “Going Native, Telling Tales: Captivity, Collaborations and Empire,” Past and Present 168 (2000), 170–93 (187), emphasis added.
55 Robbie Richardson, “The Site of the Struggle: Colonialism, Violence and the Captive Body,” in Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture, 1750–1850: The Indian Atlantic, ed. Tim Fulford and Kevin Hutchings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 39–55 (p. 40).
56 Discussing the textual continuities between Rowlandson and Richardson, Armstrong and Tennenhouse note that Rowlandson “emphasized
her separation from her culture of origins by organizing her account as a series of ‘removes’ or marches; Richardson capitalized
on the popular appetite for such narratives when he separated Pamela from her parents, a separation that fills Pamela with
a single-minded desire to return.” Armstrong and Tennenhouse, “The American Origins of the English Novel,” p. 396.
57 Castiglia,
Bound and Determined, p. 155.
58 Bartolomeo, Introduction to Rowson,
Reuben and Rachel, p. 30.
59 This is Margaret Cohen’s term in “Traveling Genres,” New Literary History 34 (2003), 481–99.